Abstract

Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) techniques are gaining increased attention from both academic and industrial organisations. In order to promote a smooth adoption of such techniques it is of paramount importance to perform empirical analysis of AOSD to gather a better understanding of its benefits and limitations. In addition, the effects of aspect-oriented (AO) mechanisms on the entire development process need to be better assessed rather than just analysing each development phase in isolation. As such, this paper outlines our initial effort on the design of a testbed that will provide end-to-end systematic comparison of AOSD techniques with other mainstream modularisation techniques. This will allow the proponents of AO and non- AO techniques to compare their approaches in a consistent manner. The testbed is currently composed of: (i) a benchmark application, (ii) an initial set of metrics suite to assess certain internal and external software attributes, and (in) a "repository" of artifacts derived from AOSD approaches that are assessed based on the application of (i) and (ii). This paper mainly documents a selection of techniques that will be initially applied to the benchmark. We also discuss the expected initial outcomes such a testbed will feed back to the compared techniques. The applications of these techniques are contributions from different research groups working on AOSD.